Surface Tension
by Stealth Noodle
Summary: In which Sheik's rescuing Ruto from the ice becomes the incredibly true adventure of a fish and a cross-dressing ninja in love.


******Disclaimer: **The Legend of Zelda is the property of Nintendo. I just go digging in its backyard for subtext.

**Author's note:** Written for hardmode, a gaming Big Bang on Dreamwidth. "Contact Angles" is the fabulous accompanying FST by shinsengumi, which you are strongly recommended to check out here (remove the spaces): shinsengumi. dreamwidth. org/ 3491. html

* * *

The world cracked. Cold clenched her lungs and gills so tightly that each breath was a razor in her chest. Her mind tripped in sluggish circles, white-blind and hum-deaf, until color and sound came back in overlapping floods as her body burst into pins.

"You're safe now," said a man's voice. Some of the pins dulled around her shoulders, and her thoughts swirled: _It's him, it's him, I knew he'd come back—_

Coughing and shaking, Ruto pressed herself against whatever was supporting her. She remembered winter without warning, a sleep-shattering shock that immortalized every bubble and ripple in ice. Her panicked rush to the break the surface had failed; the parts of her that reached the air had frozen as solid as the rest. Seconds or days or a thousand years later, her tongue thawed, and she croaked, "Link, Link, how dare you, Link, how could you leave me for so long..."

She trailed off as her vision began to make sense of the face above hers. White cloth obscured most of the features, but Ruto had a clear view of red eyes and skin the shade of damp sand. Hylians, as far as she knew, did not change colors.

The man bowed his head apologetically. "My name is Sheik."

Embarrassment washed over Ruto as she scrambled away from him, scraping her legs and hands on the jagged ice. She flicked her fins and tried to pretend that she hadn't just clung to him like a frightened child.

Sheik looked away from her as he rose. "I arrived too late. Now that Ganon's corruption has spread this far, I fear not even the Forest Temple will remain free of his curse." The white mist of a sigh drifted through his mask. "If the Hero does not awaken soon, there will be nothing left of Hyrule for him to save."

Scraps of wind agitated the fins at Ruto's temples. Hugging her legs for warmth, she let her gaze flit over the cavern—over the dazzling facets of the icy walls, over the shadowy forms of her people trapped in the mirror-world of the lake—and back to Sheik, who remained still. "Well," she said, "what are you waiting for? Get everyone else out!"

"It's no use." Sheik's eyelids flickered as he turned his face from her. "Your father and your subjects are all frozen solid, and even if I could free them, they would find no safe haven until the curse is broken. It's better to let them sleep."

"Wait, are you saying you can't fix this?" Ruto's voice echoed shrill. "What kind of hero are you?"

"Not much of one, I'm afraid." Sheik turned and extended his hand to her, which she ignored in favor of wobbling to her feet on her own power. He had to catch her before her legs buckled.

Ruto pushed away from him and glared. "You saved _me_, didn't you?"

Instead of replying, he watched the light glitter inside an icicle as his breath curled out white from beneath his mask. "I can take you only as far as Lake Hylia," he said at last. "You should be safe there until he returns."

"What if I don't want to be safe?" Her voice rang petulant, which annoyed her further. "What if I'd rather save my people? I could help—"

"I'm sorry."

She began to argue, but Sheik politely hushed her, then closed his eyes and cocked his head. Ruto heard nothing but her own breathing.

When his eyes opened, his pupils were dilated and fixed on an empty patch of air. "The canyon cuts deep into Hyrule," he said, "and corruption festers within it. I am needed elsewhere. Please take care not to endanger yourself."

Before Ruto could protest again, Sheik flicked his wrist and filled the air with white smoke. When it cleared, he had vanished, his offer of an escort rescinded.

"How dare you?" Shouting kept Ruto angry, and anger kept her warm. Bracing herself against the frosted wall, she shuffled toward the mouth of the cavern.

She had absolutely no intention of going to the lake.

* * *

Zora's Domain had been secure for seven years, a haven from a collapsing world. Despite the best efforts of her father's guards, Ruto had ventured into the ruins of Hyrule's capital, then run screaming back to the river when corpses shambled from the shadows of empty homes. She refused to regret having dared.

If she stayed within the domain, her father insisted, no harm could befall her. The fountain allowed them to weather sieges indefinitely. "We will be as patient as water," he decreed, as Hyrule fell to pieces around them, "and water always wins."

Sometimes her father was an idiot.

The warmth of the outside air hit Ruto with the shock of a thermal vent. Whatever curse seized her home ended abruptly at its borders, where summer breezes withered against the ice. This was magic beyond even legends; the great Lord Jabu-Jabu had been helpless before it. She could not begin to imagine what she hoped to do.

Ruto paused at the threshold, staring through the curtain of tumbling water at the pale morning glow, then flared her fins. "I _told_ you so," she said. "And I'm not coming back until you're all free." The echo mingled with the roar of the falls.

It would have been bad luck to look back after such a pronouncement. Drawing herself up, Ruto dived into the outside world.

As she emerged from the foam of the falls, gill slits opening along her neck, she was relieved to find the area unchanged. Nothing new lurked in the waters, and the octoroks were no threat if she swam near the river's bottom. Ruto angled her fins to take advantage of the current, ignoring the pleasant warmth of the water in favor of holding on to her anger. Irritation, she had learned long ago, was energizing.

She had also learned that she had terrible luck with boys, especially brave, handsome boys who saved her life and subsequently vanished. Years had flowed by since she last saw any sign of her wayward fiancé, and she refused to consider whether it would be worse to find him dead or dishonest. Someday, she vowed, she would tell her own daughter to keep the engagement stone until after the wedding.

Still fuming, Ruto surfaced when the riverbed shaded into the coppery tones of Gerudo Valley. The walls rose high on either side and tapered together in the misty distance; for a paralyzing moment, she felt like an egg swept away to the ocean, and she cursed herself for thinking that she could catch a Sheikah who had a head start.

But these were still her waters. She spread her fins and drifted slowly, opening her inner eyelids to better scan the canyon walls. Like any surface-dweller, he would be forced to descend the narrow ledges cut into the rock; only fools and Zoras dived in. Ruto tucked and rolled over the first of the waterfalls, then resumed searching.

Movement caught her eye on a ledge so low that the flood season would submerge it. Sheik—or someone dressed very like him—crouched on the far edge, head bowed, palms pressed flat to the ground. He leapt to his feet when she hoisted herself up behind him.

Sneaking up on a Sheikah had been too much to hope for, but Ruto had the satisfaction of seeing a flicker of surprise in his eyes as she stomped toward him, fins billowing, and opened with "You _abandoned_ me!"

The additional satisfaction of poking him was denied when he caught her hand.

"What are you doing here?" they asked in unison.

Ruto snatched her hand back with a huff. "Following you, obviously. Why are you here?"

What she could see of his face was nearly inscrutable, though a vertical line between his eyebrows suggested a headache. "Ganon's attention is divided, and his foothold here is vulnerable. I will not miss the chance to strike a blow against him. You shouldn't be here."

"I'm not missing it, either," she replied. "_You_ shouldn't be sitting around if you're in such a hurry."

The headache line deepened. "I was seeking the entrance. The darkness throbs somewhere just below."

"Just below—" Ruto's temporal fins went rigid. "Are you completely stupid? The only thing down there is the Sunless Labyrinth, and we lost it to Ganon five years ago. We flooded it and we still couldn't drive the monsters out. If you swim a stroke down there, you'll be lucky if you drown before something eats you."

His forehead smoothed. For a long moment he was silent, and it occurred to Ruto that she'd told him something he hadn't known. The feeling was so satisfying that she had to bite her tongue against spilling secrets just to keep him off-balance.

If he was uncertain now, he didn't betray himself with his tone. "I can handle monsters."

"And what about drowning?" she said, reaching for the raised scales on the back of her neck. The flesh beneath twinged as she plucked one free. "If I give you this, you'll be able to hold your breath longer, but there are passages that you couldn't swim in an hour. You need me to scout ahead." She wiggled her webbed toes for emphasis.

Sheik watched her impassively, arms crossed. "This isn't your fight," he said at length. "Your place—"

"Is saving my people!" Ruto flared her fins. "What do you want me to do, paddle around the lake until your hero wakes up? Ganon attacked Zora's Domain, so you're going to help me attack Ganon!" Without giving him a chance to respond, she sniffed and added, "I wouldn't expect you to understand. The other Sheikah are all gone now, aren't they? You don't even have a people to save. You have no _idea_ what it's like."

He remained silent, which unnerved Ruto more than any amount of rage would have. She vented a harsh breath through her nostrils and matched his gaze with one that she usually directed at guards who dared to question her presence beyond the boundaries of Zora's Domain. He didn't blink.

While Ruto considered herself the indisputable champion of staring contests, the canyon walls had begun to ripple in the heat, and she could feel the sun leeching the moisture from her skin. Stamping her foot, she jabbed a finger toward the river and said, "Fine. If you think that you can do this by yourself, go ahead and jump in. See if you can even find the entrance. And when I have to save you, you're going to feel incredibly stupid."

When he answered, his voice was soft and deliberate. "I won't endanger you."

Empty words coming from someone who probably courted danger twice each morning before breakfast. Ruto doubted he even ate breakfast. "So don't," she said. "I'll endanger myself, thank you very much."

She didn't expect him to understand that sentiment, either, but for the first time his posture relaxed. "Very well."

"Don't you dare—" The response sank in. As accustomed as Ruto was to getting her way, she generally had to put up more of a fight for it. "Well, good," she amended. "I'm glad you understand that I'm right."

Sheik extended his hand, which was heavily callused where it wasn't wrapped in frayed cloth. Ruto's brain, still trying to build up momentum again after a sharp turn, took a moment to connect his gesture to the fading sting on the back of her neck. She held the scale up in front of him and angled it to catch the light. "You have to keep it under your tongue until it dissolves," she said, then pulled the scale back when Sheik nodded and reached for it. "Receiving a Zora's scale is a great honor, so accept it with respect!"

He did, though Ruto couldn't shake the impression that doing so amused him. Sheik shifted his mask and deposited the scale so quickly that Ruto didn't catch a glimpse of his lower face. Whether this was intentional secrecy on his part or heat-related bleariness on hers was too involved a question to consider while she was dehydrated.

"Don't swallow it. I'm not going to give you another." Without waiting for a response, Ruto dived into the river and sighed as the cool current rolled over her. The world became clearer underwater, even through the thin shields of her inner eyelids. She paddled hard against the current, back toward the waterfall. With any luck Sheik had at least found the correct tier on his own; trying to climb back up struck her as only slightly less onerous than making the entire overland trek back to the river.

From above came wild splashing. Ruto glanced up to see an octorok drifting downstream, trailing dark red swirls. Sheik, she trusted, was not the sort to gulp when startled. The current carried the creature over the next cataract and out of her concern.

The entrance to the labyrinth was a secret imparted only to those warriors chosen to guard it, but Ruto had gathered enough clues to credibly threaten to run off and explore. She just never followed through, not after her father let her see her the state of the survivors when the outpost fell.

She would not think about that now.

When Ruto emerged on the other side of the cascade, she nearly hit her head against a projecting ledge. Cautiously, she pulled herself up onto the shelf and crept, arm extended, into the shadow of the cliff. The creatures were trapped deep, she told herself. No need to tremble yet. A little fumbling found a switch hidden in an overhang, and pressing it elicited the groaning scrape of stone.

The tips of the webbing between her toes registered cold air, and Ruto nearly fell over backward scurrying away from the edge of the hole. She huddled, breathing deep, trying not to imagine white eyes in the darkness below, as she waited for her heart to stop hammering. If Sheik asked about the delay, she resolved to tell him that she'd needed a moment to rest before dragging his deadweight against the current.

He didn't ask, but she still told him, repeatedly, on the way.

"You're really just not built for swimming," she finished, short of breath, as she pulled herself up on the shelf after him. There was nothing quite like physical exertion to calm her nerves; Ruto didn't have to acknowledge them in the pounding of her heart and the trembling of her limbs.

Sheik was already peering down into the entrance, fingers hooked over the edge and eyes narrowed against the gloom. His soaked fabric dripped into the hole, where the splashes were lost in the roar of the falls. He didn't get wet any more gracefully than he swam.

"Is there any source of light?" he asked.

"There's something special about the rocks if you light a torch. Don't ask me for details." Ruto knelt beside him and squinted to pick out shapes: a short drop to start, perhaps half her height, and then steep steps leading down beyond the reach of the sun. The hole was small enough to demand single-file entry, and it was best not to wonder how the outpost's defenders had exited.

Sheik landed on the first step with the silence of a shadow.

Ruto scowled and snatched at his shoulder, but he was already gliding deeper. "It's flooded, you idiot!" she called after him as she sat on the edge of the hole and scooted in. Hitting the stone sent a judder and a chill up her legs. Stooping to protect her head from the low ceiling, she set a hand on either wall for balance and took another short drop. The next landed her in ankle-deep water.

Her eyes were still struggling to adjust when Sheik's hand pressed against her chest, preventing her from walking into him. Before she could ask, a bloom of magical fire in his other hand illuminated him and the narrow stairs; then the red light was echoed in blue in the stone above, below, and around them until it shone with the brilliance of a full moon.

Ruto failed to stifle a gasp. "It's beautiful!"

"And probably drawing unwanted attention to us." Sheik snuffed the fire in his fist, but the walls went on glowing like starlight veiled by Zora fins. The stone was still cold to Ruto's touch.

A quiet splash alerted her to Sheik's descent to the next step, where he was submerged to his waist. The slope of the ceiling restricted further progress to underwater.

"See?" said Ruto, alighting beside him. "You need me already." She slid her inner eyelids shut and winked one of the outer before she dived.

The water was stale in her gills, enough so to provoke a coughing fit. She surfaced to let her lungs do the breathing while she worked through it, whereupon she found Sheik staring down at her, communicating quite a lot with an impassive expression. Ruto sniffed at him once she had control of herself and dived back in.

Already the light from the walls was beginning to fade, lending a murkier cast to the narrow world of the staircase. Ruto swam down until the ceiling and floor leveled, then opened wide into what must have once been a grand surface-side hall, now flooded with stagnant water. The fire hadn't excited the stone this far away, so Ruto set a hand on the wall above the stairs and followed it up until she broke into stale air.

In darkness thick as silt she closed her lungs and concentrated on the silence, on the stillness of the water around her. No monsters here, not yet. Perhaps the monsters had all starved long ago, or perhaps they had learned to move like ghosts. The fins at her temples twitched as she swam back, counting the seconds as she felt her way over the steps.

When she surfaced, another flame woke the walls; apparently Sheik had no trouble waiting alone in the dark. "You did what I told you to with my scale, right?" Ruto asked, then waited for a nod before continuing, "It's not far. Just take a deep breath and swim as fast as you can."

Which wasn't fast at all, of course, not with his heavy clothing and skinny legs. Ruto swam impatient circles around him as he kicked his way along, reaching the surface long after the glow had faded away.

"Turn on the lights," she said.

Sheik worked a frown into his tone. "We'll draw attention."

"Nothing was in here a few seconds ago. And I'm not going to swim around in the dark looking for the way down."

After a reluctant pause, fire and blue light bloomed over a domed ceiling not far above the waterline. Ruto looked below and saw, as expected, the refracted remains of a hall meant to be dry, now deserted. The carved structures had the look of ruins, which wouldn't have disturbed her if the outpost hadn't been abandoned for only five years.

As the glow crept brighter down the walls, it became clear that the damage had nothing to do with age. Marks as if from enormous talons furrowed every structure, punctuated by chunks torn from the stone. Ruto clapped her hand to her mouth to cut off a scream.

"What did this?" asked Sheik, with a maddening lack of panic. Ruto twisted away from him back toward the stairs and managed not to cry out at the violence done to the lowest steps.

The survivors had brought back only pieces: not whole weapons, but fragments of what could shatter a step carved from solid rock. And whatever wielded them had not been driven out by the flood.

When Sheik's hand, heavy with water-logged wrappings, touched her shoulder, Ruto realized that she was trembling. "You can go back," he said softly. "You gave me your scale."

"Don't be stupid. You'll _drown_." Ruto fanned her fins at him and headed down to explore before he could say anything else.

* * *

Tunnels twisted off in dozens of now-useless directions. The sleeping pools were pointless now that everything was submerged, and the storage spaces held nothing but floating wreckage. Torch-holders carved from the walls had been ripped free, leaving jagged craters. The illumination of the walls faded in the deeper parts of the rooms, which was just as well; Ruto had no desire to see the full extent of the devastation.

A wide tunnel sloped sharply down in the center of the wall opposite the stairs, presumably to the labyrinth itself. Its walls answered the distant fire only faintly, and only near the entrance. Unless Sheik could conjure fire underwater, they would be swimming in blind.

_She_ would be swimming in blind, first, alone. Hesitating wouldn't change that. Ruto spread the webbing between her toes and kicked hard into the tunnel, because if she went fast enough, her fear might not be able to keep up.

The stone was rough under her fingers. Twice she panicked and thought she'd turned herself in circles, but a glance over her shoulder was enough to align her with the shrinking light above. There was only silence; every disturbance in the water was of her own making. Maybe the monsters were dead, after all.

Nothing good would come of thinking about them. Ruto sped up and collided head-first with a wall.

Three curses and a headache later, she had mapped out the intersection by touch and chosen to launch herself up a long shaft, where she could just reach the walls on either side if she spread her arms like a starfish. She'd long since lost count of time, but this was a terribly long way for anyone without gills to swim. Ten seconds more, she decided, and then she would have to tell Sheik that they'd strike back at Ganon some other way.

Her right arm fumbled against a large opening in the stone. When she followed its angle upward, air chilled her head, and she breathed in the stench of things long dead. Zoras, or things that killed Zoras; she felt sick either way. But all that would matter to Sheik, she expected, was that she breathed.

"Anybody home?" she called, and her voice resounded in layers. When she paddled forward, she hit a plateau only inches below the surface.

Ruto followed the wall back down, ticking off seconds in her head, until she could see the glow of the hall again. She felt stupidly grateful that Sheik hadn't let the light go out. He was still treading water, now above the labyrinth's entrance rather than where she'd left him, and what she could see of his face was tense.

"It's a long way," she said, "and it stinks. Like _corpses_." Sheik's expression did not betray any especial disgust. "And you're slow, so you're going to have to hold on to me and let me do the swimming, okay?"

He did not appear any less tense, but he nodded and let one last flame pulse above his palm before he hooked his arms under Ruto's shoulders. It was enough like an embrace to poke at a raw place in the back of her mind, threatening to break the seal over a catastrophic loneliness. "Breathe," she snapped, with unintended harshness. As soon as his chest swelled against her back, she shot toward the tunnel with the force of an octorok's pellet.

The darkness muddled her direction and his weight dragged her down. If she hesitated, she would stop; if she stopped, he would drown. This was simple and clear enough to keep her kicking and scrabbling, ignoring the scrape of the rocks against her fingertips, until the wall rebuffed her and sent her up the shaft. His arms tightened painfully. She had gone too far—she must have missed it—her heart beat a thousand times more than it had before—

Her hand fell through the wall. Ruto climbed as much as swam upward, shoving Sheik above her.

His gasp echoed.

Shaky with relief, she nudged him onto the plateau before sinking back underwater, unable to stomach the stench. After five years, how could anything still smell so terrible?

When she surfaced again, ready to breathe without gulping air, the cavern was still dark. "Hey," she began, and the word overlapped itself as Sheik's hand clapped over her mouth.

In a whisper too low to echo, he said, "Something's here."

Ruto went rigid. Her fingers curled over the edge of the plateau as she readied herself to take off in whatever direction the something wasn't, but straining her senses brought her no signs. She was on the verge of biting Sheik's hand when something scraped and splashed on the other end of the cavern.

One of Sheik's fingers pressed against Ruto's lips before he removed his hand. He slipped into the deeper water beside her with near-perfect silence, revealing himself only by his ripples. A wisp of flame appeared in his palm. Its pale light woke the walls only gradually, like dawn rousing a sleeper, and Ruto struggled to see much of anything beyond his face.

The phosphorescence came on like the tide, rolling over a cavern nearly half the size of her father's throne room, with the high plateau extending most of the way to the walls. Silhouettes resolved into broken statues, until the one farthest from her, an enormous stooped misshapen thing, raised its head.

Ruto grabbed Sheik's arm and let go in almost the same motion. If the thing attacked, she wanted him free to fight.

It lumbered closer, began to twist into something almost familiar. Ruto had seen its like in the fields before, hulking beasts with dogs' heads and clubs large enough to knock the teeth from Jabu-Jabu's mouth. Moblins, her father called them. They sank like sacks of rupees and posed no direct threat to the Domain.

This one was bloated and gray, and the arm that didn't hold its club dangled uselessly. Its eyes, when they caught the light, gleamed blind-white. Even before Ruto saw how much of its flesh hung in tatters, she knew, with a sick horror, that it was the source of the smell.

"Stay still," Sheik whispered, his voice little more than pressure behind her temporal fin. "It can't see us."

She understood now why the survivors said that the flood made everything worse.

The moblin twisted its head too far to either side, sending foul fluids and a tooth to splash into the shallow water. Ruto's heart seized as it shambled directly toward her. Then Sheik's hand flashed in the corner of her eye, and a metallic clang rang out from the far wall.

Quick as an eel, the moblin turned and lunged toward the noise. Nothing its size should have been able to move so fast. Nothing in its state should have been able to move at all. It landed in the gap between the plateau and the wall and went under with a splash that rippled over the entire room.

Ruto found herself huddled in the ankle-deep water of the plateau with no clear memory of having clambered atop it.

"Ganon must be keeping them animated," said Sheik, in the tones of one who had not just nearly been attacked by a dead moblin. "Once we break his power here, they should find their rest, as well."

"Great," Ruto muttered. "Once we get past all the undead monsters, they won't be a problem anymore."

Sheik bent down and offered his hand. She took a deep breath and accepted it.

The far end of the cavern had a wide gap in it, leading to another submerged staircase. The light Sheik fed the walls didn't illuminate it all the way down.

Her imagination fixated on the moblin dragging itself up the steps, club and bad arm thumping against the stone, oozing pollution. Perhaps the entire invading army waited at the bottom, blind but acutely aware of every disturbance in the water.

"You're faster than they are," said Sheik. "If you sense danger, there's no shame in running away."

"You don't have to tell me that. I'm really good at running away." Ruto smiled crookedly and fanned her fins.

There were no moblins at the base of the stairs, though a dead taste in the water brought her up cold at two intersections. In the dark it was hard not to imagine them creeping behind, waiting to trap her in a dead end.

She swam and sneaked and could not swallow the heart throbbing in her throat.

* * *

"We're taking a break here," Ruto announced, pulling herself up to sit on a stone ledge. The water in this chamber had receded far enough to reveal broad protrusions above the waterline, with more visible deep below, and the air didn't smell as strongly of decay. No moblins could reach the surface without scaling the walls or floating.

Sheik was still breathing hard after a particularly long passage, clinging to her low ledge. "We shouldn't delay. The longer we—"

"Oh, hush. You're as tired as I am."

For a moment he looked inclined to argue, but he only sighed before hoisting himself up. His eyelashes fluttered as he sagged against the wall, knocking lose droplets of water. "We're drawing closer," he said, after a quiet moment. "I can feel it in the stone."

Ruto looked askance at him. "It would be nice if you could feel which way we're supposed to be going. Or at least which way doesn't have moblins."

"It doesn't work that way." His breaths were nearly even now. After taking a moment to refresh the light, he unwrapped the cloth from the top of his head. His hair fell free around his face, dark and heavy with water. Ruto had to restrain herself from reaching over to touch it; now was not the time to indulge her fascinations.

He shook the wrappings out in his lap, then held up something flat and dark and asked, "Are you hungry?"

Ruto wrinkled her nose. "You carry food in your—" vocabulary failed her— "hat?"

"Dried meat," he replied, as if this were the issue.

Her temporal fins twitched as she tried not to think about the meat hanging from the moblins. She turned the jerky over in her hands, testing the limits of its flexibility, and decided not to thank him until it proved edible.

Sheik tore off a piece of his own jerky with his teeth, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In the blue light, with his mask tugged below his chin, he looked both younger and wearier, less aloof than melancholy. He stirred something elusive in her memories.

"You usually travel by yourself, don't you?" Without waiting for answer, because a hat full of meat was answer enough, Ruto added, "Don't you get lonely?"

He shrugged. "What would it matter if I did?"

"I'd go crazy. If I'd gone to Lake Hylia like you wanted me to, I'd already be making little fishbone dolls and talking to them." Ruto waved her jerky. "I'd make fins for them out of weeds. It would be tragic."

Sheik didn't laugh, but the skin around his eyes wrinkled. "Then I'm glad you're here. I would hate to be the one responsible for the driving the Zora princess mad."

"Ha, I'm already mad. I—" Ruto caught the next words before they made it off her tongue. It was one thing to doubt silently when yet another winter passed without her betrothed striding triumphant through the falls, but quite a different thing to wrap her fears in words. Love didn't like to be rushed.

"Well, I'm mad," she said at last. "And so are you, for coming down here." She struggled to take a bite of the jerky. "And for eating this."

He chewed thoughtfully, then said, "What do you know of this place's history?"

Ruto abandoned her struggle with dinner. "This is an old place. Older than Zoras, even. A long time ago, we build the maze and put the outpost on top to protect it." She paused to bask in the warmth of knowing something he didn't. "My father said it's sacred, but not like a temple. If you get to the center, you're supposed to be able to find Nayru's footprint at the bottom of a pool. And if you stand in it, you can see the world with eyes like hers."

After a pensive moment of staring at his hands, Sheik said, "So that's how he's doing it."

Ruto flicked her fins. "Don't be ridiculous. Ganon can't possibly be standing down there."

"One of his servants is. Something that communicates with him from a distance and lacks a mind to overwhelm." He looked up, not at Ruto but past her, as if he were reading from the dimming wall. "For years now, Hyrule has lived in terror of his ability to know of all plots against him, no matter what care the conspirators take. They believe he hears their thoughts. I traced the root of his evil to this place, but I had no idea what magic he has enslaved; not even the most jealously guarded secrets of the Sheikah could operate on such a scale."

A shiver drew Ruto's legs to her chest. "Is he watching us now?"

"I don't know. I have reason to believe that he cannot see all things at all times, so we should assume that he chooses his focus, either by suspicion or at random."

Part of her wished the light would fade faster. "You said he was distracted now, though, right?"

Sheik nodded. "He's growing arrogant as his curse takes root in the temples. I can do nothing for them, but I might able to put out one of his eyes." Bitterness crept into his tone as he added, "All I can do is follow three steps behind him, trying to mitigate the worst of his damage until the Hero awakens."

"Don't start with that." Ruto shook her jerky at him. "Here we are, deep in his territory, ready to hit him where it hurts! That's not purifying a temple, but it's definitely _something_."

The sad ghost of a smile tried to possess his face, though it was difficult to tell in the encroaching dark. "Here we are," he agreed. By the time he spoke again, he was scarcely visible. "We should sleep here. There may not be another room this secure."

"I don't know if I can," Ruto said, but she curled up obligingly on her side; no matter how unlikely a moblin was to reach the surface, she didn't want to sleep in the water. In the dark, tensed between fear and exhaustion, she lost all sense of scale and had nothing but the stone to anchor her in the void. She wanted to go home. She didn't have a home anymore.

Sheik's hand rested on her back. He was warm and gentle and solid, and Ruto drifted off listening to him breathe. In her dream the waterfall washed Link's face away as he strode through.

* * *

The room was bright again when she woke to the faint, incongruous strains of music. Sheik sat on the edge of the stone, his back to her, coaxing low, somber notes from a lyre. What she could see of his face was bare and serene and almost unfamiliar, as if his usual tension so defined him that he became someone else without it.

She knew, then, which memory he stirred.

Something difficult to pin down, somewhere between the distance in his eyes and the slant of his mouth, evoked a solemn Hylian child who saw storm clouds in a clear sky. Ruto had expected Zelda to make for a dull playmate while their fathers discussed politics, but by the time the Hylian court departed, Zelda had learned how to catch fish with her bare hands and left her gown inside Jabu-Jabu. If Ganon hadn't wrecked everything, Ruto thought they might have grown up together as friends.

This was just one more thing lost, one more hollow place in her chest. Sheik's dirge wasn't helping. Annoyed, Ruto dipped her hand into the water and splashed him.

He sprang up like a geyser. A knife flashed into his hand. "You're so jumpy," she said, and Sheik sheathed his weapon without comment, though his muscles remained taut. She almost regretted disturbing him.

The lyre and knife disappeared somewhere in the mystery of his clothing. "Are you ready to go?"

If he wasn't upset, there was no sense in apologizing. Instead Ruto looked him over critically and said, "You know, we'd go a lot faster if you weren't wearing all that."

He pulled his mask over his lower face. "I dress as I do for a reason."

When he showed no signs of volunteering it, Ruto prompted, "Which is?"

"I am one of the Sheikah. What we wear is a symbol of our heritage and identity."

He wasn't telling the full truth, obviously. Ruto sniffed and flicked her ulnal fins. "That's nice, but you'd go faster underwater if you weren't dragging your 'heritage' around with you."

"My skin isn't like yours. I dress also for protection."

"Then why do you sleep in it?"

"I..." For once, Ruto detected something like worry in his pause. "I'm not like you."

She bit back a snicker. "So it's true that your kind can't keep it inside when you're not using it?"

In the startled moment before he turned his back on her, his face matched the color of his eyes.

Ruto's lips twitched. "I see. Then—I guess—" Half-giggles jostled each word on its way out, so she gave up and flopped back in the water to laugh.

"Just try to focus," Sheik said coolly.

* * *

She had to focus, or she'd never find her way back; the passages split off like octorok legs, and the stone beneath her hand vanished suddenly into vertical shafts. When she came to a less complicated fork, Ruto paused, memorized the shape under her fingers, and took the right-hand path.

The passage angled upward and branched off into narrow dead ends that she explored one by one, with increasing irritation. She came at last to an intersection where the floor leveled off and there was no way forward, only broad routes to either side. As she puzzled over the map in her head, rot floated in from the right.

Don't panic, she told herself. Ruto turned with as little disturbance to the water as possible and was confronted with the same stench on the left.

There was nothing for it but to return to the earlier fork, then, and count the entire passage as a wasted exploration. Resigned, Ruto twisted back the way she had come and tasted death again. Her temporal fins went rigid.

She closed her gills to still the water; if their brains had already rotted, perhaps they'd think she disappeared. Holding her breath turned her mind turbid. They were still approaching. She could feel them on the water.

If they could sense her presence, she could sense theirs.

Ruto opened her gills and fins, fluttering the latter like flags. The moblin in front of her lunged, but she kicked off hard from the wall toward what she hoped was a gap.

Something hit the stone above her with a disorienting crash. If she was disoriented, so were they. Ruto's muscles burned as she kicked wildly, letting the wall pop tiny scales from her fingers as she struggled to keep track of her path. If she darted down a dead end, she might never come back out.

When she hit the fork again, she took the opposite path as fast as if she were falling, and didn't stop until the water smelled merely stagnant.

Sheik would never make it this far on one breath. When she stopped shaking, she folded her fins and crept back to find another path, her pulse pounding her skin like a new drum.

* * *

"They're everywhere down there," Ruto said when she returned. Her voice shook no matter how much she willed it not to. When Sheik slid into the water, she grabbed him and clung unapologetically.

To her relief, he didn't ask questions, only held her and stroked her back in the direction of her scales. If she closed her eyes, she could fall into the end of a dream that she always woke before reaching, the poetic moment when she was rewarded for seven years of patience.

This was not her dream. Flustered, Ruto pushed away from him, ignored the pang she felt when confusion flickered across his face, and began fishing her thoughts from their eddies. "We have to go," she said, with an edge she didn't intend. She tried again: "It's not far. The way's clear now, but the moblins are moving down there, so we should hurry. But we need to go slow once we're underwater. In case we have to turn back."

When he nodded, she took his hand and dived with him. She had so much to focus on—the scent on the water, the feel of the stone, the fourth path clockwise two body lengths up when the tunnels branched like an anemone—but into every gap in her thoughts poured the warmth of his hand and the weight of his trust.

* * *

The next path closed while she was returning along it; the thick stench of moblin filled a narrow passage and remained longer than Ruto's nerves could hold. The detour she finally discovered stretched on far too long for anyone without gills, requiring her to start her exploration nearly all the way back over. There was no shortage of routes to try, at least.

She led Sheik in quick darts between tiny rooms, some no more than shafts with pockets of air trapped at the tops. When Ruto surfaced in a chamber large enough to echo, with flat stone above the water and no recent death in her nose, she risked passing very near the evidence of moblins to bring Sheik.

"I don't need to sleep," she told him as he illuminated a broad plateau that curved up into the far wall. "I just need to stop for a while or my heart's going to explode."

With a nod, Sheik settled in cross-legged near the wall, leaving her ample space to stretch out. She lay supine and studied the arch of the ceiling as he drew soft notes from his lyre. If she hadn't been so thoroughly sick of the dark, she might have rested her eyes.

When the phosphorescence began to fade, Ruto sat up and said, with quiet urgency, "Don't let the light go out."

The lyre was tucked away. Sheik's fist opened like a water lily, coaxing heat from the air, then closed again when the stone brightened.

Now that her eyes were on him again, she couldn't turn them back to the ceiling. It wouldn't be like this, she told herself, if she weren't frightened and lonely and so acutely aware of death beneath her like a riptide—but if this was meaningless, then so was her engagement. She didn't want to think about that now. She wasn't even certain what it would be like if she weren't lonely; that longing had tinted everything for a long time, as thoroughly as if it coated her inner eyelids.

His eyes were on her, too, and she was sick of the quiet.

"I'm lonely," Ruto said, letting the word overflow. "Not just down here, I mean."

Sheik drew a long breath and hesitated inside it. "So am I."

Asking for elaboration carried the risk of denial, so Ruto held her tongue and waited to see if he'd continue on his own. As she reached the end of her patience, he said, "I sleep alone in the wilderness to avoid endangering a host. If I trust, if I bond, if I accept a home, I become real. I can survive in this world only as a ghost."

The phosphorescence lent a haunted cast to the world, small as that was this deep in the labyrinth. On impulse Ruto reached for his hand to make sure that he was still solid, and he did not pull away. His unwrapped fingers were warm under hers.

"You shouldn't have to," she said. She should have stopped at this; she would have, perhaps, but he laced his fingers through hers and held tight, and his eyes were so deep that she could feel their undertow. To look away was to remember that everyone she loved was gone. "There's no one here but us" was more bearable and no less true.

The lines around Sheik's eyes softened as he said, "I'm sorry if I'm poor company."

"Don't be stupid." Ruto hesitated only a moment before setting her free hand on his cheek, where the skin was soft, free of the scratchy-looking hairs she'd seen on the faces of other Hylian men. When he didn't object, she trailed her fingers along his jaw, pushing his mask down. The rising and falling of his chest quickened.

Everyone was gone and he was here, and his skin made hers tingle like the memory of a biri shock. His hand rested on the curve of her hip.

The moon was on his skin and the tide was under hers. Ruto breathed deep and followed gravity.

Sheik's lips were warm and chapped, giving him a roughness that was not entirely unpleasant. After a stiff moment they parted, softened by her tongue, and she caught his lower lip between both of hers. He moaned deep in his throat, washing out hot breath, as his fingers curled into her side.

Ruto wasn't sure whether she was pushing or he was pulling, but he fell back beneath her against the cavern wall, his mouth hot and alive under hers. Their breaths came sharp and out of sync.

Abruptly he pushed her back.

"This..." Sheik's voice came out husky and uncertain. He pulled his mask back over his mouth, refusing to meet her eyes. "No. This isn't right."

As much as she wanted to argue, Ruto's thoughts had begun to flow clearly again. Her blood redistributed itself into her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she said, but she wasn't, not as much as she should have been. She ached to tackle him and kiss him until he shut up.

She thought of Link, seven years lost, and how she no longer gazed for hours through the curtain of the waterfall. When she remembered the weight of the sapphire leaving her hand, she tasted bile.

"It was my fault as much as yours," said Sheik. He crouched, muscles tensed, keeping as much space as possible between himself and Ruto. His tone suggested that he considered himself the guiltier party, and Ruto wanted to scream at him.

Instead she sat down heavily and hugged her knees to her chest. "Did you just cheat on someone, too?"

He closed his eyes and fell silent until nothing he said could be taken for answer. "We shouldn't linger here," he said evenly. "I can feel now how close we've come to the heart of Ganon's darkness. The longer we remain, the more we risk his attention."

Ruto couldn't care about Ganon's heart when her own was raw. "Don't you have anything else you want to say?" she snapped.

Sheik slid his eyes open to meet hers, features almost trembling under a glass mask of stoicism. Ruto found herself too flustered to peel her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

She opened her mouth again, then turned with a sharp "hmph" and dived underwater.

Here the passages grew stranger, winding deep into the rock before tapering off into dead-ends, as if the tunnels had been bored by the roots of an enormous tree. Any of them would have been enough to drown Sheik. But she wasn't thinking about Sheik, or mistakes, or how alone she felt in the winnowing dark where not even weeds could grow. Ruto concentrated on the rock chafing her fingers as she turned into a spiraling tunnel.

This passage ended not in rock but in a pool, the surface of which Ruto broke to discover a cavern where the walls were already dimly aglow. She froze, wondering if the moblins had discovered fire, but there no sound of smell of them. Once the initial panic passed, she picked out the shape of a surface-side tunnel, which grew brighter at its far end.

Whatever Ganon used as an eye, it didn't languish in the dark.

As she swam back toward Sheik, Ruto almost wished that the area didn't smell empty of moblins. Without the focus of fear, her thoughts drifted too quickly to wondering whether Sheik could hold his breath all the way through the spiral—a reasonable enough concern, but she kept imagining that she would have to save him by breathing into his mouth, and from there it was a quick mental dive into saving him from his restrictive clothing.

Her imagination was a terrible thing.

Her earliest suitors had earned only her indignation, which came in the form of flared fins and demands to hear how _dare_they when they knew she had a fiancé. Afterward she would hide herself away in a cove to pretend her hands were his as she imagined how gorgeous he must have grown up to be, how gallantly he would return to sweep her up and reward her patience a thousandfold. What was love, after all, without a little long-suffering self-denial?

Later, when her suitors were so bold and beautiful that she ached after rebuffing them, her imagination turned to rescuing Link from whatever held him back. There would come a message in a bottle, a fish that spoke like a Zora, a secret song on the breeze. Her sweetest satisfaction came with fantasies of sweeping _him_ up, danger and dry land be damned.

And time had trickled on without a sign, and she resented making excuses for him, and she wasn't even certain now what she was waiting for. If she was unfaithful, perhaps he had been so first.

* * *

Ruto could still feel the heat in her cheeks when she surfaced. An arrested note from Sheik's lyre echoed away to nothing.

"Come on," she said, keeping her back to him. "I have to carry you again."

He slipped into the water silently, but his ripples gave him away. "I'm sorry."

"Shut up."

Not letting him drown kept her focused; she couldn't think while sharp twists turned her stomach and fire split her muscles. He coughed and shook when they broke the surface together.

"There's light," Sheik panted as she helped him to the edge of the rock. "Did you discover the source?"

Ruto inclined her head toward the tunnel. "I didn't want to go exploring alone."

"Whatever it is—" Sheik pulled himself up gracefully, breaths already almost steady— "we should expect it to see better than a drowned moblin." His voice dropped to a lower whisper as Ruto came up beside him: "I'll scout ahead. Will you promise to run without me if am overpowered?"

"Of course not."

The visible part of his face suggested a smile, and he touched her shoulder briefly before flowing silently along the wall toward the tunnel entrance. Ruto folded her fins and followed as best she could, deciding to interpret "scout ahead" as "walk two paces in front." The tunnel inclined upward, bright and empty, and was littered with the shattered remains of what might once have been columns. From ahead came the sound of sluicing water.

The path ended on a ledge overlooking a wide shaft of a room with a ceiling that extended upward into darkness, beyond the reach of the illumination rippling up from below. A thin waterfall spilled from somewhere high on the opposite wall. When Ruto pushed ahead to peer down, she saw nothing but a glowing, gelatinous mound filling most of a dark pool. She recoiled into Sheik.

"What _is_ that?" she hissed.

He knelt on the platform, palms flat, and closed his eyes. "The darkness we've come to destroy."

Ruto flattened her temporal fins. "I guessed that much. I meant, what in Jabu-Jabu's name is it? Are those tentacles?"

Sheik's eyes opened and squinted. "They would appear to be so. The luminous masses are its eyes."

"It's covered in eyes?" Ruto nearly forgot to whisper; her hand flew to her mouth before Sheik managed to cast a chastening look. "What are we supposed to do to it?"

A curved knife flashed into Sheik's hand. "Put them out."

If her favorite childhood playground hadn't been internal anatomy, this might have disgusted her. "And how are we supposed to do that? It's all the way down—"

Infuriatingly, Sheik set a hand and both feet on the wall and slid down, in casual domination of gravity. Ruto's mouth opened and stuck that way as she tried to work how she was meant to follow, whether he was leaving her behind on purpose, how long he had before the whisper of his foot on the rock drew the monster's attention—

Round lumps swiveled, resolving into individual eyes with dilated pupils. A tentacle thicker than Ruto's leg and ten times as long thrashed upward; she gasped in the moment it took Sheik to kick off from the wall, a blink before the space he had occupied was struck. He landed on his feet at the pool's edge and immediately leapt away from another tentacle.

"Idiot," Ruto muttered. She shifted her weight anxiously as he stabbed an eye, rendering it deflated and dark, and scarcely rolled away from a furious retaliation. There were too many limbs; he couldn't land another blow while dodging them in water up to his waist.

After a fruitless glance for a way to descend the wall, Ruto ran back into the tunnel, hefted the nearest chunk of stone, and staggered with it to the edge.

Throwing was beyond her quaking muscles. She settled for dropping.

As she leaned forward, panting, slime squirted out from the landing site; she'd missed the creature beneath but torn away a wide swath of its eyes. Sheik shouted something that she didn't have time to make sense of before a tentacle knocked her off her feet.

By instinct she latched on to it with both arms and went screaming with it toward the wall, until it whipped abruptly back before impact. Sheik must have stabbed it. When its thrashing tipped her near the pool, she swallowed her panic and let go, to land on something that burst under her weight.

"I'm okay!" echoed up the shaft as she scrambled toward the wall. Another tentacle lashed so close that she felt a rush of air. The lidless eyes spun wildly, struggling to compensate for the blind stripe.

When the eyes and tentacles focused on the opposite side of the creature, Ruto rushed to retrieve the horribly slick stone, then swung it into a low cluster. The popping noises promised to haunt her nightmares.

Something inside the dwindling mass of eyes spun, and Ruto's fins stiffened as an enormous pupil peered at her through the damage.

"There's an eye _under_ the eyes!" Further indignation was cut off when a tentacle wrapped around her throat and yanked her backward under the surface of the pool.

Her fingers could not pry it loose; her kicks might as well have landed against a wall. Gills open, Ruto forced herself still and waited, straining to hear the muffled sounds of Sheik's movements through the churning water. She hoped the monster couldn't feel the pounding of her pulse. In the corner of her eye, she watched another tentacle sink to the bottom of the pool, blossoming darkness.

At last her captor unwound with enough force to spin her. Ruto remained limp for three eternal seconds in case it was still watching, then paddled as unobtrusively as she could to where the stone had fallen. The water thickened with blood and vitreous humor.

Ruto surfaced on the smooth side of the giant eyeball, which now appeared bare; the smaller eyes were crushed or torn and drained, littering the water like algae. The only light now came from the walls' memory. The two tentacles still able to move lashed at Sheik in a coordinated frenzy, cornering him by the waterfall.

Hers arms couldn't lift the stone high enough, even if they hadn't been sore and shaking, so Ruto raised her leg above the waterline and kicked.

The eye whirled on her, bloodshot and wild, its pupil large enough to engulf her head. She launched herself from the bottom of the pool but wasn't quicker than the tentacles, one of which coiled tight around her arm. Her shoulder wrenched as it jerked her into the air.

It meant to dash her against the wall. Ruto fought to throw it off-balance and found herself shaken like a handbell. "Hurry up!" she howled, just before its grip slackened. She twisted away and landed with it in the pool amid an enormous splash.

When the waves fell, Sheik stood where the eye had been, knife in hand, coated with blood and slime. One of the tentacles still twitched at his feet. "Are you hurt?" he asked.

Ruto didn't expect to be able to lift her arms above her head tomorrow, and she felt bands of bruises forming where she had been grabbed. "Not badly," she replied, floating upright. "I'll feel better once I rinse all this off. Are you okay?"

"Thanks to you." He turned and trudged through the muck to the waterfall, where he climbed onto a jutting rock that put him directly under the stream. Filth rolled off him in slow waves.

Ruto followed, pushing aside the husks of eyeballs and swirling globs of humors. Something gelatinous caught in the webbing of her feet and was dislodged by a frantic kicking fit.

Sheik made an unfamiliar noise that his eyes suggested was a laugh. "You weren't so revolted when you were crushing its eyes."

"I was expecting that," she said defensively, paddling with her legs tucked in tight. "This just surprised me." She accepted the hand that he extended and clutched his wrist as she used her legs to climb, feet slapping against the slick stone. When her heel slid on a streak of eye, he pulled hard and caught her up against him.

It was purely practical, she told herself, for him to hold her as she found her footing beneath the shower. So it was equally practical to cling to him, pressing tight to his torso and breathing in the smell of his sweat mingled with the fresh water. His hand lingered just above her ventral fin, which fluttered.

"See what a great team we are?" she said, with a breathy laugh. "We could do anything together."

Abruptly he let go of her, eliciting a started noise as she flared her fins to keep her balance. "We shouldn't do anything you'll regret," he said.

Ruto scowled at him. "I mean anything like breaking the curse on my kingdom." Her temporal fins flicked, scattering droplets. "And don't you dare tell me what I'll regret."

When he opened his mouth, she dared to expect an apology until he said, "We must ensure the footprint is safe. We can't be certain that the creature we slew was not merely a decoy."

"What idiot makes a decoy out of eyes?" Ruto muttered, but Sheik was already back in the pool, advancing on the space the eye had occupied and the one tentacle still coiled underwater. Now that only ripples disturbed the water, she could follow its flow to the wall opposite her, where the filth of the battle had begun to gather. Presumably an outlet kept the room from filling.

Ruto hopped reluctantly back into the water to watch Sheik drag the tentacle aside, revealing a raised shallow basin of black stone, almost high enough to breach the surface of the pool. A depression shaped like two tadpoles joined at the tails lay at the center, glowing the same phosphorescent blue as the walls. Unlike the walls, its light was not beginning to fade.

"Huh," said Ruto, which was all she had time to say before Sheik spread his hands above the basin and did something complicated with his fingers. The emblem and its glow vanished under a seamless layer of rock.

He cut her off four words into a lecture about sacred cultural heritage: "It's only an illusion. Sheikah magic is all light and shadow, appearance and deception." To demonstrate, his palm sank through what looked like a solid inch of basalt.

She poked dubiously at the space, disturbed by the lack of sensation until she struck true stone. "Well, good," she decided. "You can't just go around destroying goddesses' footprints." Her finger traced the smooth edge of the emblem. "What do you think you'd see if you stood on it?"

"Anything with a mind would go mad."

"Does it ever hurt, being so cheery?"

His hand brushed hers under the phantom stone and lingered. Ruto smiled at him until he said, "I think I've found a switch."

The wall opposite the cascade began to rumble. What had been a drain gaped its way to a tunnel, guzzling the turbid water and husks of eyes as Ruto clutched the basin to avoid being swept away. The rumbling ended as the tunnel's maw grew large enough to admit three Zoras abreast. The sound of rushing water continued, loud enough to be heard over the little waterfall.

Sheik relaxed his own grip on the basin. "Do you think this is an exit?"

"An exit for Zoras, maybe." Ruto frowned at the darkness. "We used to know where the footprint was, so we must have guarded it, and the guards must have needed a quick way out if something went wrong..." She chewed thoughtfully on her lip, checking her logic for holes. "If it were a trap, it would have sealed and flooded the room. That's how all Zora traps work. We're very traditional about it."

His hand again found hers. "We can't go back the way we came."

"No." Ruto took a deep breath. "Hold on to me. I won't let you drown."

* * *

The tunnel was long and steep and so flooded that it must have been fed by enough tributaries to drain the entire labyrinth. The water flowed like rapids, buffeting them against the walls; Ruto clung with her head tucked against Sheik's chest, wincing at every collision strong enough to take his breath away, straining to hear his pulse. The darkness was suffocating. She had no sense of geography anymore, only the vertiginous sense that it should not have been possible to fall so far from the hollows of the canyons.

The came a point of light smaller than a scale, which in a few heartbeats grew to engulf and blind her—

A slope sent them dizzyingly airborne. Ruto landed hard on what felt like dirt, still tangled with Sheik. His "oof" was proof enough that he was still breathing, so Ruto focused on blinking away the sun's dazzle. The fresh air smelled of grass and clay and nothing undead.

"Hey," she said, fumbling blindly to pat Sheik on the back, "look, we did it! We're alive! We're..."

Squinting, Ruto picked out the shape of the water arcing over them, bursting forth from a gap in a familiar rock formation. Beneath her was clay, and this was wrong; she should have been underwater. Ruto's stomach knotted as she took in the extent of the damage: the majestic depths of Lake Hylia drained to a puddle around the temple entrance, with another, smaller puddle forming as the labyrinth poured out around her.

Her sentence hung unfinished as she struggled not to cry.

Beside her, Sheik coughed and pushed himself up. Ruto took his arm and walked with him up a gentle slope, to a grassy patch above where the shore should have been. She couldn't bear anymore to stand where she should have swum. The parched earth under her feet woke the memory of walking on ice, heating her rage to a boil.

"Look at this," she said, temporal fins trembling, sweeping her free arm despite its soreness. "This is _my_ kingdom, just as much as the Domain. Ganon can't just curse all of it and expect to get away with it."

Sheik nodded without meeting her eyes. "The Hero—"

"No." Ruto halted with a stamp of her foot and put both hands on her hips. "I'm not waiting around for someone else to come fix it. I'm _sick_ of waiting." Currents were crossing in her brain, and she couldn't hope to tell them apart; she couldn't even separate her anger from her longing, or her lingering giddiness at having won from her grief at not having set everything right at once. "If we could kick Ganon out of the Sunless Labyrinth, we can kick him out of the Water Temple, too."

When Sheik remained infuriatingly silent, she added, "If you really want to wait around for some hero so badly, you can do it yourself afterward. I think we're just fine at heroics ourselves."

His attention seemed focused somewhere in the sky. Ruto tensed in preparation to pounce on him if he tried to vanish again, for all the good that would do. Instead he looked at her with something uncertain in his eyes and said, "We could."

Ruto grinned and, with nowhere else for her tension to go, went through with the pouncing. He let her—she knew better than to believe he couldn't have dodged—and they rolled together through the grass until he ended up beneath her, flushed and bright-eyed, in a gully abutting the western cliff.

In the distance the tumbling of the water slowed. No one else was nearby. Even so, there was no stillness here, no dead things refusing to yield to the living; birds and insects chirped, the breeze stirred the grass, and even if the comforting sounds and smells of the deep water were gone, she had the sun and the sky and Sheik. She felt, somewhere deeper than bones, that her lake was neither dead nor lost, only waiting to wake up again. All the world was sick of waiting.

Sheik's hand was on her hip. By the time she thought to consider Link, she found nothing left to consider.

"We could indeed," Sheik said dryly, "but you'd have to get off me first."

The temple was less immediately important than his touch. Ruto shimmied her weight down his body, mindful not to catch his fabric the wrong way against her scales, to rest her chest against his. Her voice came out huskier than she expected: "Not yet. I'm comfortable."

At first Sheik answered only with his stillness and the heaviness of his breathing. Even through the annoyingly thick layers of his clothing, Ruto could feel his heart throbbing, hot and fast and alien and wonderful. "Ganon should be blind now," he said slowly, as if working through a logic puzzle.

"He'd better be, after we put all those eyes out."

A silent laugh rippled his stomach before he sobered. "I don't want you to regret—"

"If this is about you, then just say it's about you. Don't you dare push your regrets on me."

His expression was impossible to read, not because it was blank but because it said too much all at once. "Then stay," he whispered at last, warm breath fluttering her temporal fin. His voice and hand trembled lower: "I want to stay."

If the goddesses disapproved, then they had so far done a spectacularly awful job of making their point.

"Hush," Ruto said, not because he had said anything wrong but because she was about to give him cause to. She traced her fingertips along his jaw, easing his mask down as far down as the material allowed. He made a low noise she couldn't decipher but did not push her away.

"I should tell you," he began before she shushed him with her mouth. He stiffened, then parted his lips and pulled her tighter against him.

Sheik wore too much clothing, particularly in the places Ruto wanted it least. Her fingers sought access as heat unfolded between her thighs, as her hips rolled against his and met only flat fabric; apparently his kind _did_ keep it in inside when they weren't using it. His hands slid shivers up her back.

He angled his head back, bringing her lips in contact with his chin. "You don't understand. I need to tell you—"

The next word was washed away by a moan as Ruto nibbled his lower lip. "I need to tell you things, too," she murmured, "just not right _now_." He couldn't talk when his mouth was busy, so she left it unoccupied again only long enough to add, "It's your fault you're wearing all this. You take it off."

Instead he rolled and dislodged her. Ruto yelped as she landed sideways, head spinning with blood that no longer knew where to rush.

"Jabu-Jabu's _balls_!" she shouted, as this was the most profane oath she could think of. She crossed her legs to cover up the fact that she was still the intimate sort of naked.

He was already on his feet, shivering as if someone had run a cold finger down his back. His swollen lips parted in an expression too complicated for joy or fear. "He's awake," Sheik whispered, in a tone that failed to clarify his emotion. "After seven years, he's awake."

His intensity infected her; she tasted something sharp in the air and felt the grass stirring like an eddy beneath her, and for a moment she forgot to be furious with him. "What—"

Ruto broke off coughing as smoke swirled around her. When her vision cleared, Sheik had vanished, and no sign remained that he had ever been beside her.

"How dare you?" she yelled, fins flaring, voice breaking. She leapt up to stamp her foot and wave her arms, to no response whatsoever. Dark smoke swirled and sank above the shallow water. "I helped you! I gave you—I showed you—and you—I—"

Scowling, she slumped down on a section of shore that should have been submerged. The last traces of smoke curled away. With a long sigh, Ruto skipped a stone over a puddle and bit her lip when it sank the few inches to the bottom.

"I am so tired," she told it, "of being _left_."

* * *

**Coda**

It was easier to run away as a sage. When the concern of her people suffocated like muddy water, Ruto had only to shout something about the temple to clear a path for her escape. She found a solitary solace now within its walls, something secret and unshared, as if she'd found a new Jabu-Jabu to hide inside.

After a week she was sick enough of it to follow the river to the ruins of the castle town, where she surfaced into a lavender twilight.

The Hylians were rebuilding slowly. Tents dotted the broken roads inside the gates, between the skeletons of buildings. From the eastern end came an odor reminiscent of drowned moblins, so Ruto wandered westward, outside the wall. She wasn't certain what sign she needed until she heard the faint notes of a lyre, which drew her to the base of a tree.

Ruto squinted up into the leaves and said, "You could have _told_ me."

The abrupt end to the music left a final note to fade, high and lonely, into the night air. After a long pause, Zelda replied, in a voice that teetered on the edge of emotion, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for everything."

"Well, I hope not _everything_." Ruto waited for a lighthearted response; getting none at all, she stamped her foot. "Oh, stop brooding and get down here. We need to talk."

After an uncooperative silence, Zelda said, still flatly, "I told you I was sorry. What else is there to say?"

"Are you kidding? You avoided me the whole way down the mountain. Did you think I wouldn't notice? _Darunia_ noticed." No response. "Did you think I wouldn't understand? Ha! I understand better than anyone."

Zelda hesitated, then let something hopeful creep into her tone. "So you're not upset with me?"

"Of course I'm upset with you."

Hope skittered away like a water strider. "I'm sorry. I had to protect my identity."

"I know. I'm still upset." Ruto set her hand on the trunk and peered up in the foliage, struggling to discern shapes. "I'd be less upset if you weren't still hiding from me. What are you doing up there, anyway?"

The leaves rustled as the dark silhouette of a leg came into view. "It's hard, being what they need now. I'm here now because I'm being selfish."

"I understand. I'm selfish, too." Ruto backed away to leave a landing space. "Just come down now, okay?"

The silence stretched moments into years, then snapped back as the leaves whispered aside. Zelda alit like a shadow, scarcely solid enough for sound.

From the waist down, she might have passed for Sheik. Her upper half suggested that the evening was too warm, or that she had left in too great a hurry; where Sheik had worn the tabard that curved up into a mask, Zelda had only dark fabric, tight enough to flatten her breasts, and her head and arms were bare. All of her was somewhere between now: her eyes were cobalt, her hair cropped unevenly above her jaw, her skin pale except for her face and hands.

"You look different every time I see you," said Ruto.

"This is what I really look like. For now, at least." Zelda folded her arms and addressed her right hand. "I can't be a princess without a disguise, no more than I could be a Sheikah. I hid beneath a spell for seven years; waiting for my hair to grow again is nothing."

Her lips remained parted, as if she couldn't decide whether to continue. Ruto used the fading light to gaze as intently as she could—down toned arms to callused hands, up legs that flared out into hips and back in again, over the suggestion of curves and up to hooded eyes—and smiled. "So this is really you," she said. "I'm glad I can finally see you."

A subtle twitch of surprise raised Zelda's chin, and her posture, if not quite relaxed, no longer suggested that she was ready to bolt back up the tree. A crooked smile drew her lips together.

Encouraged, Ruto asked, "So how are you adjusting?"

"I'm... trying." Zelda bowed her head. "I can't resent that he's gone—not after what I did—but for seven years he was every hope I had. Now he's gone, and when I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself."

When Ruto kept quiet, she continued, "I don't know anything about ruling. I know how to move without making a sound, how to kill without leaving the shadows, and how to live in the wilderness. Now that I'm supposed to be royalty again, I can scarcely remember how. I can scarcely remember _her_." Her left hand closed over the back of her right, tendons straining. "I'm sorry. I'm being selfish again."

"No, you're being silly." When Zelda looked up, frowning, Ruto crossed her arms and flicked her fins. "You've always been_you_."

The frown deepened. "Have I? Being Sheik became familiar, but never right. Does that make sense? Now I'm right but unfamiliar."

Presumably this made sense to anyone who had lived for seven years under an assumed identity. "You're familiar to me," Ruto replied. "I guess we haven't changed that much since we were kids, since Sheik reminded me of you."

Zelda's lips pressed flat for several moments before she asked, "And how are you adjusting?"

Evasive, Ruto decided, but only fair. "Well, so far, being a sage is like being a princess, only worse. All the extra attention is the kind that just makes me feel lonelier. If that makes sense." At Zelda's nod, she added, "And I've missed you."

With a flick of her eyelids, Zelda's gaze returned to her hands. "There's so much now to miss. My father, my home, everything Ganon destroyed..." Her voice fell: "Do you miss him?"

Ruto's fins bristled. "No, and neither should you. We both wasted seven years on him—"

"He saved Hyrule," said Zelda. "I wouldn't say 'wasted.'"

Ruto sniffed. "Well, he's gone now, isn't he? He's off being a kid again, and we have to clean up the mess. I don't even want to talk about him anymore." Relaxing her fins, she added, "I took my sapphire back, and this time I'm not giving it to anyone who hasn't _already_ been with me for seven years."

In the pause that followed, cricketsong drowned all other sound. The town lights shone small and unsteady in the east. When the silence flowed on, companionable but heavy, Ruto took a deep breath and said, "Either way, I'm finished with it. That's what I wanted to tell you before you _left me_, that I wasn't going to wait for him anymore." She kept talking, because she needed to hear the words from her own mouth: "I let him go. And then he showed up again because his timing is terrible, but the moment I saw him I knew that I didn't really want him, not the way I used to. And my heart didn't even break, it just... floated."

Zelda didn't look up from her hands. The thumb of the left rubbed methodically at the back of the right, concealing whatever it was so intent upon touching. Ruto wondered if she was this exasperating on purpose.

"I don't want him," Ruto went on, in case the point had gotten lost. "I want you."

The rubbing stopped as Zelda's head jerked up. Her cheeks darkened. After a moment she drew a shaky breath to replace the one she'd been holding and lowered her eyes. "It's Sheik you want, isn't it? I think he was the same way."

Ruto stamped her foot. "We can say his name! It's not like it's going to change anything. Link, okay? Link's gone, so stop dredging him up." Something in her throat tried to close around the final clause, so she coughed it away, fluttering the fins at her temples. "And you're everything that matters about Sheik. The rest is just a costume, and why would I want a costume?"

"But we—I didn't think you'd still—"

"Oh, please." Ruto folded the fins at her temples and clasped her hands daintily beneath her chin. "Dear me, I didn't mind when we were just different species, but if we're both girls, then it's _weird_.'"

Zelda made a noise too sharp and startled to be a laugh. Her words trembled out between uncertain pauses: "I thought it would stop."

"Why?"

"Because I was pretending to be someone else, and I let myself forget that the pretense was only ever skin-deep. I took—" Zelda's hands clenched, and she looked away, blushing, as her words stumbled over each other— "I took shelter once at Lon-Lon Ranch, and when Malon looked at me—the way she looked at me, I couldn't believe those feelings were mine."

The confession seemed to make her no less tense, so Ruto kept her tone light as she moved closer and asked, "Should I be jealous?"

Another surprised sound loosened Zelda's fists and took the shadow from her flush. "No. I just meant... I thought that reclaiming my name would make everything simple again."

Ruto rolled her eyes. "I could have told you better. Are you _sure_ you've got the Triforce of Wisdom?"

"There's a difference between knowing something and accepting it."

"I know." And accepted things sank in peace, so Ruto didn't gather hers back to the surface. She brushed a lock of hair behind Zelda's ear, delighted by the silky strangeness of it, and smiled when she wasn't pushed away. Her hand curved over Zelda's shoulder as she said, "You said that being Sheik didn't feel right."

"It didn't."

"Then why are you still trying to look like him?" To eliminate confusion, Ruto's free hand cupped one of her own breasts and jiggled it.

Frowning, Zelda crossed her arms over her chest. "It's still familiar."

Sometimes there was nothing for it but to dive in and hope the water was welcoming. Ruto ran her fingers down Zelda's arm to rest on her hip, and her voice was almost steady as she asked, "Can I help?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Let me show you." Ruto slid her hand up Zelda's side, following the curves Sheik's tabard had hidden, until she found a place where the fabric parted under her fingers. It fell loose around Zelda's hips, revealing the white wrappings that bound her chest, without eliciting protest. Ruto's fingers tested the shape of a knot, began to tug. "Let me. Okay?"

Zelda shivered and kept her arms crossed in front of her, but she nodded and remained quiet, her gaze intent, as the wrappings slipped down her back and left red lines behind. She made a low noise that wasn't quite a gasp.

"Let me?" said Ruto, softer this time, as she flattened her palm against Zelda's back. The skin beneath her scales quivered. When Zelda nodded again, just slightly, she slipped her other hand beneath the folded arms to curve over a bare breast. The feel of it excited Ruto more than she'd expected; she wanted to rub and squeeze and roll the hardening nub between her fingers, but the stiffening of Zelda's back suggested that this would end either very well or very poorly. So Ruto only held, fins fluttering, and shifted nearer until her nose brushed aside a loose strand of hair, until Zelda's ear trembled under her breath.

"I want you," she whispered. Her tongue traced the bottom of the lobe.

In Ruto's next breath Zelda's arms had uncrossed and wrapped around her, pushing her back against the tree. Touch was a fever, rippling deeper than scales and skin. They needed a thousand hands.

Zelda's lips were familiar, warm and chapped and trembling wild just under their surface. Her palms drifted and electrified like biri; her nipple hardened like a pebble under Ruto's thumb. When Ruto's head tipped back to follow the arch of her spine, Zelda's mouth rained heat over her throat. Her legs shook, unable to decide whether they were more desperate to press together or spread apart.

Then Zelda made a small breathless noise, an echo of Sheik an octave higher, and pulled away.

"I'm sorry," she said, arms closing back over her chest. "I don't know what I'm doing."

Ruto's frustration rode out on a loud sigh. "I think we were figuring it out pretty well."

Something like a laugh escaped. "You don't," Zelda began, then cleared her throat. "You don't fall in love with someone in just a few days."

"I can if I want to. And what does it matter, anyway? It's not like I'm offering you my sapphire." Ruto took a deep breath as she tried to set her words in order. "I just want to be with you—_really_ you—without anything in the way. I want an adventure. A good one this time, without any undead things."

Receiving no response, Ruto sidled nearer and added, "That's what I want. What do _you_ want?"

Zelda was quiet and tense for too long, as if she'd been cornered by something she thought she'd eluded. Her arms parted so that she could stare at the back of her hand. "I want," she said, then paused again to moisten her lips. "I want to do what we did, but as myself."

"So what's stopping us?" Ruto set her hand over Zelda's, covering the space that kept stealing her attention. "Hyrule's not going anywhere. Let's run away for a few days."

Zelda looked up, startled. "I can't. I have to rule now, I can't just—"

"You were running away when I got here." Receiving no response beyond a guilty silence, Ruto added, "And this isn't really running away; it's international relations. You can't be a queen without those."

Pink crept into Zelda's cheeks, but she relaxed under Ruto's hand and managed a lopsided smile. "Impa won't be happy."

"Who cares? Impa's never happy." A ripple passed through Zelda's smile and left her lips curved a little higher. Encouraged, Ruto leaned in closer and added, "_We_ saved the world, too. Don't you want to enjoy it?"

A deep breath came in answer, followed by a glance back at the town walls. The lights glinted briefly in Zelda's eyes before she turned away from them and nodded.

"Then come on," Ruto said, lacing their fingers together. "I'll help you figure it out."


End file.
